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ABSTRACT: Tlingit repatriation activities at museums become ceremonies involving both Tlingit and museum staff. These groups connect to one another in a temporary alliance that erases their differences, and for a time celebrates an incorporation of colonizer and colonized. The principle challenge to a successful repatriation is the US legal notion of "right of possession." Even if items are not returned, some museums have made efforts to allow clans to use them in ceremonies. These complex ceremonial interactions between staff and Tlingit within the museum setting can represent yet another form of these empowering expressions of cultural self-determination, a process we might call repatriation sovereignty.
KEYWORDS: at.óow, Harold Jacobs, museums, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), protocol, right of possession, sovereignty, Tlingit
In 1997, Mark Jacobs Jr., the leader of the Tlingit Angoon Dakl'aweidí clan, stood in a hall at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (DNMS), proudly wearing the Killer Whale Clan Hat, which was being repatriated to his clan.1 In proper Tlingit oratorical style, Jacobs spoke:
Don't wake me up this is a great dream. I never realized the day that we would get this valuable hat back in our clan possession. Now we will be able to take it home . . . our culture is not dying, our culture is very much alive . . . This [ceremony] is just a replica of [what] we really carry on in Alaska . . . [it is important] to pass on our regalia . . . learn the protocol . . . learn how we exercise our knowledge in front of opposite tribes [clans], in front of other Native American tribes . . . and [in front of] our white brothers . . . we have come to a point where your culture has not completely dominated us. We are still very much alive. (video, DMNS)2
As Laura Peers suggests in this volume, repatriation activities involving museums and First Nations representatives can become ceremonies, "formal actions . . . whether performed by museum staff to comply with institutional culture or Indigenous claimants to express theirs." As I demonstrate in this article, the various speeches, dances, songs, and interchanges during a Tlingit repatriation process take place in a ceremonial context...